ABSTRACT
Taking up the call for sociologists to develop alternative approaches which enable futures to be taken seriously, this chapter examines the possibilities that recordings of the past offer for the development of such sensibilities. It locates Mass-Observation data – which is regularly used by contemporary sociologists to build accounts of social change and is valued for its ‘pastness’ – as a possible site for the cultivation of such an alternative approach. Taking up a stance requires, however, that Mass-Observation data is understood not to comprise recordings of the past which are already over and complete, but recordings of time in which possible futures might inhere. This chapter therefore amounts to a call for sociologists to rethink their relationship to recorded data and in so doing to open out one potential route towards speculative research.
